Changan Group, the Chinese OEM, has developed a new advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) in house, designed to make driving safer, smoother and stress-free.
The system, named SDA Pilot, has been launched in three versions, spanning three tiers of operation – Pro, Max and Ultra – with a more advanced tier to follow. The first production model to be equipped with SDA Pilot Ultra will be the Changan Nevo Q06, which is now open for pre-orders.
SDA Pilot features active LiDAR detection and 10Hz high-frequency reasoning, which Changan says enables it to detect road hazards earlier than human drivers, even in low-light, glare, rain, or fog conditions. The end-to-end large model of SDA Pilot is trained on over 20 million segments of real-world driving data, to produce intuitive, human-like driving behaviour.
The system can also deliver interactive navigation powered by a vision-and-voice fused multimodal large model. Changan says the natural-language voice commands and driving behaviour memory enable a true “dialogue” between the user and the system.
The SDA Pilot Ultra version integrates Highway NCA, Urban NCA, intelligent parking assist with more than 400 scenarios, and 31 active safety features. Ultra is powered by a 560 TOPS computing chip and a 256-line LiDAR, to deliver millisecond-level responses.
“Changan’s intelligent driving team has grown from a handful of engineers to more than 7,500 people, backed by cumulative R&D investment of more than EUR 7.7 billion. We will continue to pursue our strategy for intelligent transformation and to build our core technologies in-house,” said Zhu Huarong, chairman of Changan Group.
The next milestone came on December 20, 2025, when Changan received the first official licence plate in China for Level 3 conditional autonomous driving.
“Changan began developing intelligent driving technology in 2009, when it was still a laboratory subject in China. SDA Pilot is the result of everything we have learned since,” said Zhao Fei, president of Changan Group.
Changan began in 2009 as a small lab developing intelligent driving technology, and developed prototypes of forward collision warning and lane departure warning functions in 2011. The company achieved mass production of its Level 2 IACC (Integrated Adaptive Cruise Control) system in 2018, and as well as massively increasing its workforce, has now set up the Changan SDA Lab. This facility supports collaboration with 24/7 uninterrupted testing, over 400,000 virtual simulation scenarios, and 3.3 million kilometres of daily simulated driving mileage covering climate conditions in 224 regions across the globe.
